A Word Taster’s Companion: Huh. Is that all? Uh-uh.

Posted on March 6, 2013 | 3 comments

Today: the fourteenth installment of my how-to guide for word tasting, A Word Taster’s Companion.

Huh. Is that all? Uh-uh.

What’s left? Is that it? Not even close. There are many sounds that people use in language that we haven’t touched. Most of them can be figured out by using new places with the same manners, or new manners with the same places, and a few require even more inventiveness. But while many of them are occasional allophones in English, almost none of them are English phonemes.

Almost none. We do have a couple of sounds left, one of which is definitely a phoneme but is hard to pin down as to its features, and the other of which is easier to pin down for features but may or may not be a phoneme (but is definitely a well-used allophone).

What are they? They are the difference between uh-huh and uh-uh.

That’s a nice minimal pair, as linguists would say. The difference between two opposite things – yes and no – lies in just one sound. The vowels are the same, front and back. To give a thumbs-up, let the air flow through your throat, /ʌhʌ/; to give a thumbs-down, stop it momentarily, /ʌʔʌ/. (You can also say it [ʔʌʔʌ].)

OK, what’s that thing, [ʔ]? It’s a glottal stop. You know the sound well enough. You probably make it in place of the /t/ in button. If you’re a certain kind of British speaker, you make it as an allophone of /t/ in between vowels: [mæʔɜ] for matter, for instance. It stands in for stops in quite a lot of places, in fact; you might even say it for /p/ in yup. You might even use it in something if you say it casually as [sʌʔm] (“supm”). And in some dialects you might use it in place of [h], as in ’Enry.

But is the glottal stop a phoneme – a distinct sound? Or is it just in uh-uh to keep the two vowels as distinct syllables? It’s probably safest to say that [ʔʌ] is an allophone of /ʌ/. But that glottal stop is certainly a sound we use in English!

And how about /h/? It is often called a glottal fricative. The problem is that it doesn’t normally actually involve greater constriction of the airway. And, in English, it doesn’t act like a fricative. English voiceless fricatives can come between a vowel and a stop (mask, raft, wished) and all English fricatives can come at the end of a word (give, biz, rouge), neither of which /h/ can do in modern English (except in special cases like huh and hah, which sometimes end with [h]). In Old English, yes – but that was a thousand years ago. In some other languages it can as well, and for them it’s reasonable enough to treat it as a fricative. But in English it’s its own little special thing, available only by itself at the beginning of syllables (and, in some dialects, often not there). It also has a tendency to be reduced in some circumstances of casual speech to nothing or near nothing. It’s a phoneme, no mistake: you know the difference between an eel on a heel and a heel on an eel. And it’s a consonant – you say a heel, not an heel. But it’s its own special kind of consonant in modern English.

These two sounds, [h] and [ʔ], are a pair notable for their absence not only from the rest of the classification but from actually being heard. Yes, /h/ is audible, but barely, and sometimes not really at all except as a gap in the sound. The glottal stop is simply a break in the flow of the sound: it’s the ultimate absence. There’s not even any enunciatory cue into or out of it – the tongue and lips don’t need to move for it to be made.

It goes without saying that we don’t have voiced variants of these. The surprise is that some languages do have a voiced equivalent for /h/. How is that possible? What it is, in fact, is really a breathy voicing added to the end of the preceding vowel or the beginning of the next. Make a low, lewd laugh – huhuhuhuhuh – and you will likely be alternating between /h/ and breathy voicing.

What do [h] and [ʔ] feel like to say? Exact opposites: /h/ is a perceptible free flow of breath, whereas the glottal stop is a perceptible lack of flow of breath. It does not usually produce a sense of asphyxiation, though it may leave you with extra breath to expel at word’s end. It simply gives a little catch or hiccup in the flow, and there are a variety of flavours that can have. The breath of /h/ will naturally be associated with all things expressed by breathing out: exhaustion, exasperation, excitement, or even ease. It’s so often so gentle as to be just like a brush of a feather – but it always expels extra air, leaving you a little closer to winded.

Next: syllables

3 Comments

Posted in language and linguistics, word tasting notes

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

at the end of the day

Posted on March 5, 2013 | Leave a comment

“At the end of the day,” the guy with the orange polyster tie said, “we’re all about value here. Value and quality.”

Maury looked skeptical. This was his first time buying a new car (after all these years), but he had heard stories. “Does it get good gas mileage? All things considered?”

“Well, you know, you drive some in the city, you drive some in the country, but a car you get from us, at the end of the day, it’s going to be economical with the gas.” He leaned his torso in its checked jacket against a counter and took a slug of his coffee.

“What is the service record like, in the long run?”

“I’m telling you, at the end of the day, the cars we sell have better service records than any other make.” He paused, then nodded once for emphasis.

“And yet you’re selling the extra protection warranty. In the final analysis, is that such a good deal, then?” Maury circled the car one more time, running his finger along the detailing.

“You know, if it were just you and the car…” The salesman made a flat wipe with his hand. “You wouldn’t need it. But there are other drivers out there, and nature. Rocks. Ice. At the end of the day, that warranty is a good deal.”

Maury raised an eyebrow and he and I exchanged a glance. This salesman sure was focused on the end of the day. I was wondering if he was impatient to go home. I glanced at the clock: still just early afternoon. Well, people do tend to speak in habitual manners, and fads come and go for clichés. At the end of the day has been in use in its figurative sense at least since the 1970s – but it didn’t take long for the Oxford English Dictionary to include “hackneyed” as part of its definition.

“The handling in difficult conditions?” Maury asked. He opened the driver’s door and sat on the side of the seat.

“At the end of the day,” salesdude said, one arm holding coffee cup leaning against the door frame, “any car you get from us will handle better than any other one you can get.”

“So, in sum, all in all, when all is said and done…” Maury said.

“At the end of the day?”

“Sub specie aeternitatis?” Maury said. The salesman looked at him blankly. “When it comes down to it, is it really the best one for me? Or should I look at a few more?”

“At the end of the day, you won’t find another car that’s better for your needs.”

“And are you really, when it’s all added up, giving me the best deal you can? Are there other plans, other promotions, other incentives –”

“At the end of the day, no.” Salesmeister swept his hands apart smartly. “You won’t come out further ahead than what I’m offering you.”

Maury paused a moment. “Very well, then…”

I didn’t think I could trust the salesman as far as I could throw him. But Maury clearly liked the car, and he was just seeking assurances. The salesman seemed confident and forthright enough to him.

Looking back, though, one thing is clear to us: Maury should have come back in the evening, just before closing. The car Maury bought that afternoon turned out to be a lemon and an open sore on his bank account. Everything the salesman said may have been true… but we’ll never know, because it wasn’t the end of the day.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

captious

Posted on March 4, 2013 | 2 comments

As you wander through word country, as you pick and serve your delicacies of syntax and lexis, keep an eye open for the snares. There is a subset of the word country population who are there not to nurture and relish but to hunt, trap, capture. They are the catchers, the captors, the cacciatori. They are the captious.

Captious, because they set snares and seize on any small fault they can find. For them, the language is already too capacious and needs to be more rapacious. They have self-printed hunting licences declaring open season at all times. They forge on them the signatures of authorities, but in truth there is no central office, for the language is a common creation, cultivated by all. The jackbooted brigades that these trappers would like to call forth are not to be found; there is only this infestation of the captious, individuals with apparent common cause but in actual disagreement on many points, and their thirst to cavil outweighs their understanding of the subject. True understanding can be gained only by tending and nurturing, not by darting raids on the eggs and seedlings.

There is no fault too small for the captious. Nor need the fault be real: these cacciatore chickens play by invented rules, snaring and bagging on the pretext of imaginary laws that were confected only to give a smirking justification for hanging the language to drain its blood. Hanging from what? Flimsy scaffolds that they pretend are living syntax trees.

You can see them in the wild, scratching out captions and imposing Sharpies on apostrophes. Online you will find even more: the screen captious are the horseflies of cyberspace, buzzing and stinging between the tweets. Today has likely been an extra busy day, as it has been Grammar Day. Imagine: a groaning buffet table of the best and most beautiful of language, set out for all to take, but beset at the edges by the captious, who fling food to the floor, measure distances between dishes, set mousetraps beneath the fruits and cheeses, brandish bodkins at would-be diners. The gastronomy becomes an occasion of paranoia and competition. The gardeners and chefs of words must set out their defences and swat away the parasites.

But while we do not welcome the captious, beleaguerers of words and of word-lovers, we do welcome captious. It is a good word from a decent family with many close resemblances. From the progenitor capere ‘take, hold’ come capture, catch, caption, cacciatore (Italian for ‘hunter’), captor, and captious, among others, as well as cousins such as capable. This crisp word, captious, snaps like a trap or the clap and echo of a gunshot. It is well used to say ‘inclined to find fault on whatever pretext, to entrap’.

When you encounter the captious, as you inevitably will, counsel them: Do not be so captious. And when they start ringing ropes around you on the basis that there must be standards, and unitary enforced standards at that, ask them to start by setting and exemplifying standards for good manners, respectfulness, maturity, and thoughtfulness.

2 Comments

Posted in Word Country, word tasting notes

Tagged ,

anathema

Posted on March 4, 2013 | 1 comment

The first thing to know about this word is that the stress is on the second syllable, and the th is voiceless. It thus sounds very much like the first four syllables of a mathematician.

When I look at it, it appears to me rather like a broad building with columns in its façade and a peaked roof just in the middle – not a clerestory; more like a low steeple, perhaps.

But then I notice the article right in the middle: the. And then I notice the articles in the beginning: an, a. It has all three articles stacked up, followed by ma, which might be a mother or might be the Mandarin particle indicating a question: so it could be an – a – the – ma, speaking of an, no, a, no, the mother; or it could be an, a, the ma? – i.e., asking if it’s an, a, or the.

Small wonder that there might be confusion. This word is in fact typically anarthrous. That is to say, it usually takes no article. It is treated as a mass object. Like garbage, junk, trash, etc.: “Such ideas are anathema to us.” And it can refer to a thing or idea, or to a person (“Such a person is anathema”), or to the act of declaring that the thing or person is anathema – in this last sense, it is countable: “He pronounced an anathema.”

Who or what would be anathema? Most classically, a heretic meriting excommunication. If you look in the Canons of the Council of Trent, you will find that, for instance, anyone who objects to the mass is to be anathema, and of course it follows that objections to the mass are also anathema. I am tempted to say that this is why anathema is a mass object.

But actually the canon law formula, stated quite tidily by Jimmy Akin as “If anyone says . . . <INSERT SOME AWFUL HERESY HERE> . . . let him be anathema,” imports a Greek word into the Latin. That “let him be anathema” is, in Latin, anathema sit (the sit is the third-person singular subjunctive and is used for a third-person imperative, and is gender-neutral), but that word anathema is taken undigested from Greek. It’s sort of like how we borrow food terms from other languages and handle them with kid gloves. “If anything be pickled vegetables cut in small dice and mixed with a small amount of light sauce, let it be antipasto.” The Greek phrase that anathema sit translates is ἀνάθεμα ἔστω, anathema esto. So we have an English word borrowed directly from Latin, which borrowed it directly from Greek, and Latin preserved the Greek phrasing undigested, and English preserved the lack of article from the Latin (although Latin used articles less often than English does).

And where does that Greek phrase come from? The apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians, first chapter, eighth verse: ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐὰν ἡμεῖς ἢ ἄγγελος ἐξ οὐρανοῦ εὐαγγελίζηται [ὑμῖν] παρ’ ὃ εὐηγγελισάμεθα ὑμῖν, ἀνάθεμα ἔστω. Which means, “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned” (that’s the New International Version translation).

So that’s what anathema means? It would be accurate to say it means ‘accursed’ or ‘consigned to damnation’ or ‘excommunicated’ (Jimmy Akin explains helpfully that anathema sit in canon law does not automatically excommunicate a person; the person must be formally excommunicated in a rather solemn ceremony involving candles being thrown onto the floor, and the person can be formally reconciled if he or she recants – but also, it isn’t in use at all anymore; it was abolished in 1983). In more general use, it tends to mean ‘utterly unacceptable’: “Although Comic Sans is anathema to most graphic designers, the commemorative album for Benedict XVI posted by the Vatican is done entirely in that very font.”

In its sense, then, anathema is a nasty word, and in common usage it is typically constrained into a particular phrasing: X is anathema to Y. It looks like an adjective, and yet dictionaries tell us it is a noun. I suspect that in the minds of many users it is actually an adjective, but that’s not the official edict. One must take it as an article of faith that it faithfully has no article.

Its origin is not actually nasty. The Greek word ἀνάθεμα does mean ‘an accursed thing’, but it comes to that as ‘a thing devoted to evil’, and that is because in origin it just means ‘a thing devoted’ – that is to say, ‘a thing set up’ (up to the gods). The ana is the same as in anagram and anachronism (it means ‘up’) and the thema comes ultimately from the verb τιθέναι tithenai ‘put, set, place’ (and yes, it is related to our word theme). So somehow from ‘set up’ it has come to mean a version of ‘sent down’.

I think Anathema would make a good name for a heavy metal group (I do not mean like actinide and lanthanide). And in fact there is a band of that name who formerly fit into the doom and death metal genres, but now play music that is more in the alternative and progressive genres. Which is kind of funny, because some of the songs they’re playing now would be anathema to many death metal fans. (I leave it to you to YouTube them or not.)

But how does the word feel to you? Iva Cheung, who suggested tasting this word and who has posted a cartoon about it on her blog, finds that the open vowels and the reminiscence of the pattern in ethereal make the word more pleasant in form than in sense. I find that it has a taste of anthem, which has a positive solemnity to it, but I find also that under the influence of its sense the word seems to hiss like a fork-tongued demonic creature – funny how nasty a sound can seem to be if you wish to hear it in that light. The sounds are all so soft, but the sentence so harsh: like the rustling of silk as a robed hand is raised to point to the door through which a person is to be ejected.

Such a contradictory word. And such a word of contradiction and malediction. But your judgement of its flavour is entirely up to you: you are the anathematician.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

coulis

Posted on February 28, 2013 | 1 comment

What does this word bring to your mind? Perhaps nothing. But if it does bring something, then I wouldn’t be surprised if that something were a tomato coulis, or a red pepper coulis, or a raspberry coulis or some other berry coulis: a fairly thin purée-style sauce without hard lumps or seeds, probably distributed in Jackson Pollock style like jacks and a ball on your jackfruit and pollock, or even more likely in Saturnine or Saturnalian orbit around a chocolate dessert of some sort.

John Ayto, in The Diner’s Dictionary, coolly sets the record straight:

A coulis is a thick purée or sieved sauce made typically of vegetables or fruit (tomato coulis is a common manifestation of it). Nouvelle cuisiners’ penchant for using fruit coulis, especially made from raspberries, at every opportunity has recently made the term familiar to English-speakers, but in fact it first crossed the Channel nearly 600 years ago, in the form ‘cullis’.

Cullis! My, the things one culls. And by what portcullis or port-of-call did it come to England? What was this thing? It was a strong broth made from boiled meat – for example, beef tea (beef tea is a term forever tainted in my ears by its being repeated enthusiastically by an annoying boy android in an episode of an after-school cartoon I watched in my childhood, not that you would care about that).

And a coulis was originally a broth or jelly made from the juices of roasted meat (you now have a new name for that stuff that comes from your roasting pan – it’s not just jus, and, oh, it’s not au jus, which means ‘with juice’: your language is too lumpy if you serve a meat “with au jus”). The key, though, in all cases, is that it’s strained. The source of coulis is ultimately Latin colare, ‘strain, flow through’, source of our word colander.

Do not confuse coulis and coulisse (and do not confuse coulisse and calice, but that’s another thing). A coulisse is any of a few things: a corridor; one of the wings on a stage; the outside traders on the Paris Stock Exchange, and the place they gather; and a groove for a sliding sluice gate. The last of these is likely something you will find somewhere on the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State.

Coulee, like coulisee, comes from the same Latin source as coulis, but in the case of coulee it’s by way of the French verb couler – cool, eh? A coulee is a ravine or gulch or arroyo or wadi, a sort of grand natural sluice for rain runoff but dry most of the year. This, apparently, is a western Canadian and western American usage. I didn’t know that, and I didn’t know, when I was in high school in Banff, that not even all of my classmates knew the word. I was new in the school in grade 10 (my classmates from Exshaw all went to Canmore, and I was glad not to), and one of the students had the last name Coolie. I remarked to another classmate, “That Coolie is a son of a ditch.” He did not get the joke. But I got a reputation for saying things that didn’t make sense.

Anyway, the Grand Coulee was a great big coulee. I say was because it doesn’t really count as a coulee now. It’s filled with water, thanks to the work of many labourers – men who carried heavy loads here and there, among others. Not waterboys! But also not – perhaps you thought I was going to say – coolies. Why not coolies? Because coolie is, as you likely know, a racist term used pretty much exclusively on Indian (i.e., from India) and Chinese manual labourers, particularly freight handlers and carriers. The word comes from Gujarati and/or Tamil and/or Turkish; it seems a sort of collation of words for an ethnic group, a labourer, and a slave. It was what they called the poor sorts who had to go around (often in broad shallow conical hats) doing hot work while the European colonials coolly oversaw them from the cooler shade while having a cool drink.

So the labourers on the Grand Coulee Dam were not coolies. And their work was to build the dam, not directly to fill the coulee. But the results was that they blocked the Columbia River, displacing many people and obstructing many fish – and permitting the irrigation of many crops and the production of much electricity. Quite the strain; was it worth it?

Imagine, though, if the strain had been not civil engineering on a big coulee but a big colander sieving coulis – filling the Grand Coulee coolly with coulis. Would you say “Raspberries to that”? Would you throw tomatoes? Or would you gulp the gully down your gullet, gorge yourself on the gorge? Or just use it to sauce the fish?

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , , , ,

English’s foreign plurals

Posted on February 27, 2013 | 2 comments

The monetary unit of Swaziland is the lilangeni. English speakers are helpfully reminded that the plural is emalangeni: one lilangeni, two emalangeni.

But why?

I don’t mean “Why does SiSwati, the language of the Swaziland, pluralize that way?” That’s easy: as with other Bantu languages, its nouns are in different classes, identified by prefixes, and plurals are a different class from singulars. No, I mean “Why do we feel obliged to use the SiSwati plural when we’re speaking English?”

It’s not normal, you know. It’s not normal for languages, when they borrow words from other languages, to borrow the morphology: the different forms for plurals, possessives, etc., and the different conjugations for verbs.

It’s not even normal for English to do that. We don’t borrow conjugations when we borrow verbs: we don’t say “They massacreront them!” instead of “They will massacre them!” We don’t borrow possessives when we borrow nouns: we don’t say “The radiorum length” instead of “The radiuses’ length” – oh, sorry, that should be “The radii’s length.” Right?

Because sometimes – just sometimes – when we borrow a noun we also borrow the plural form. This is especially true with newer borrowings and with borrowings in specialized areas (science, food, the arts). We’re not very consistent about it, so it can sneak up on you, like so many other ambush rules we have in English.

And there are so many borrowed plural forms – because there are so many plural forms to borrow. Read 9 confusing ways to pluralize words (by me) on TheWeek.com for details on ways and reasons.

But if we’re going to talk about pluralizing things the way we always have in English, there’s one other issue: we haven’t always pluralized using –s in English

Nope. In fact, a thousand years ago, when English nouns had three genders, only the masculine ones got –s (actually –as), and not all of those did either. Other ways of showing the plural were to add –u, –a, –e, or –n, or change the vowel, or do nothing. English has changed a whole lot since then. Noun and verb forms have gotten much, much simpler – thanks to interaction with speakers of other languages, especially Norse and French. You can really thank the French for the fact that we use –s/–es on most words now for the plural.

But since that’s what we do now, should we do it with all new words we steal, I mean borrow? Well, it’ll sure make life easier if we can settle on octopuses. But it might just sound kind of wrong and blah if we order paninos and look at graffitos on the wall. And it would be less fun if we couldn’t jokingly say to a bartender, “I’ll have a martinus. No, not martini – I only want one.” It’s the eternal struggle of English: do you want it easy, or do you want it fun?

2 Comments

Posted in The Week

Tagged , , , , , ,

A Word Taster’s Companion: Wow! Yay! Glides!

Posted on February 27, 2013 | 1 comment

Today: the thirteenth installment of my how-to guide for word tasting, A Word Taster’s Companion.

Wow! Yay! Glides!

Glide. Come glide with me. You’ll get the hang of it. In fact, you already have the hang of it. You may never have been on a hang glider, but you have certainly glided smoothly on open air. If you’re flying a hang glider you may say “Wow! Yay!” But any time you say “Wow! Yay!” you’re gliding, no matter where you are and what you’re doing.

A glide is really a high and tight vowel sound serving as a consonant, the open air flowing smoothly but somehow making a consonant. In English, we have two glides: /j/ and /w/, the first sounds in yay and wow. You know (if you’ve been paying attention and have read “The vowel circle”) that the ay in yay and the ow in wow are diphthongs: vowel sounds that involve a movement. These ones in particular move to narrower vowels, [ɪ] and [ʊ]. But you can also hear, especially if you say “wow wow wow wow” and “yay yay yay yay,” or if you hold the opening sound (“wwwwwow” and “yyyyay”) that the opening sounds are pretty much the same as the final sounds of the diphthongs.

Glides illustrate even more clearly than liquids the fact that what is a consonant is often a matter of how it is used and thought of as much as of its characteristics. This is not true of all sounds; /a/ will never be a consonant, and /t/ will never be a vowel. But there is a grey area where consonants and vowels blur together, and the glides are in it (although I think glides sound more blue and yellow than grey).

This is not to say that the glides are absolutely identical with the vowels except for how they’re used. They may or may not be. Say “ye ye ye ye ye woo woo woo woo woo.” Notice how you can tell where the glide stops and the vowel starts. In these words, the glides have to be tighter than the vowels in order to be distinguished from them. Watch how you say ya and you and we and wa. See if they’re as tight.

But now say “ow ow ow ow a wa wa wa wa” and “ay ay ay ay a ya ya ya ya.” Watch how you say them. How closed are the glides? What else are you doing to make the distinction so it doesn’t just sound like “owowowow” and “ayayayayay”?

Glides are voiced. They don’t have to be. But we no longer have phonemic voiceless glides in English. We almost still do: if you want to distinguish which clearly from witch, you may devoice the /w/ – or just say a /h/ before it that spreads the devoicing onto the /w/, which is not quite the same thing. A similar effect can happen in words such as human and humour. Glides are also susceptible to the same devoicing caused by aspiration that affects liquids: try pure twit. Say that slowly, perhaps as if you’re describing someone with great disdain. Listen to the glides: /pjur twɪt/ – the aspiration from the /p/ and /t/ spreads onto the /j/ and /w/ and devoices them.

Glides can also be nasal or non-nasal (oral), just like the vowels they resemble – and, as with those vowels, this variation is allophonic but not phonemic in English. It spreads from a nearby nasal: compare mute (/mjut/) with beauty (/bjuti/). You may find it hard to hear the difference, but it’s there.

What do glides feel like to say? They’re sort of like the yo-yos of the mouth, perhaps in part because yo-yo uses them. The tongue (and, in /w/, the lips) swings in close and then pulls back, like an upside-down bungee jump. These are also things your mouth does while tasting – tasting wine, for instance. A wine taster will have a sip of wine and, holding it in the mouth, inhale on a [w] gesture to aerate it. Then, lips closed, the taster may make a series of [j] gestures ([jajajaja]) with the tongue to swish the taste in the mouth and get it into the nose. When held, glides can have a sense similar to that of nasals: they can express hesitation (“Yyyyyyyeah… wwwwwell…”) or enthusiasm (“Yyyyess! Wwwwwow!”)

Next: Huh. Is that all? Uh-uh.

1 Comment

Posted in language and linguistics, word tasting notes

Tagged , , , , , , ,

moxibustion

Posted on February 26, 2013 | 1 comment

Visual: The x is likely to leap out. They always do. The two i’s stand up like lit cylinders. The word starts with mo and ends with on, a near-symmetry at the extremities. It looks like a mixture of odd parts, about which more below.

In the mouth: The word starts and ends soft with the nasals /m/ and /n/, but in between it has a certain catch and burst. The /ks/ near the start and the /stʃ/ near the end give a sound like a lighter being flicked, and the /bʌ/ (/bʌs/) in the middle is percussive in a dull, solid way.

Etymology: This truly is a mixed bag. The bustion is the end of combustion, and so is from Latin – splitting an original root, combu- (referring to burning up). The moxi does not come from the same root as moxie, nor is it related to amoxicillin (the amoxi there comes from amino and oxy). No, it is more related to mugwort – the herb, not the word. It comes from the word moxa, which is not mocha – it’s a soft wool made from the down of the leaves of certain plants, notably mugwort. The word moxa comes from Japanese mokusa, which is a variant of mogusa, ‘mugwort’, which has no relation other than coincidence to the word mugwort; rather, it is from Japanese moe-kusa, meaning ‘burning herb’. So the word starts with a burn, reduced and transformed, and ends with the cut-off tail of a burn, plus a noun suffix (tion).

Collocations: This is not a common word. Where you do see it, typically in articles, one word that you’re likely to see near it, though not next to it, is technique.

Overtones: This word has moxie. Never mind the etymology; you can’t disregard its strong flavour in the opening. You may also get a taste of maxi and perhaps mix. The x is a little sexy, like a Roxy roller, or perhaps a little radical and independent like Moxy Früvous. Its exceptionality is axiomatic. The short bus in the middle gets lost in the conflagration, the rumbustious burst of combustion. Somewhere in the background you may hear mock Sebastian, but while Saint Sebastian was pierced with arrows, there is no puncture in this word. Not quite.

Semantics: No puncture? No, moxibustion is something you may do as an alternative approach for acupuncture. Instead of putting needles in key points in the body, you light a pointed paper tube filled with moxa and hold the point of it where you would put a needle. You may remove it before the skin is burned, or you may hold it there long enough for the skin to be burned at the point, to blister and burst thereafter. The aim is to stimulate circulation and improve flow. Sure you wouldn’t like a needle instead?

Where to find it: You will find this word pretty much exclusively in articles on “alternative” therapies. They will explain that moxibustion is a technique involving [etc.] and used for [etc.] and so on.

Serve with: Are you the sort of person who likes to put whole peppercorns in salad dressing so that your guests may, every so often, be taken unawares by a burst of black pepper in the mouth? Then you may enjoy popping this word into your prose for its sound and obscure reference. Just once. See if you can find a place to do it sometime this week. Don’t explain. Just word-bomb. “The service cuts are a sort of civic moxibustion, leaving blisters and just a hope of efficiency improvements.” “He was not so much smoking the cigarillo as performing moxibustion on his lips with it.” “‘Shingles or moxibustion?’ she said. ‘Freckles,’ I said, and pulled my shirt back on quickly.” Your turn. If you’re on twitter, tweet me your sentence: @sesquiotic.

1 Comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged ,

teepee

Posted on February 23, 2013 | 7 comments

This word has a much fuller flavour from experience for me than it probably has for most of you reading this. I grew up on the Stoney Indian Reserve in Alberta – the Stoneys are a branch of the Sioux people. In their own language they’re the Nakoda (compare Dakota for a better-known branch of the family). My parents worked for the Stoneys and had – and still have – many friends among the Stoneys. My father is fluent in the language.

So there were many evenings in my younger childhood when we would go to a pow-wow (yes, a pow-wow – a big social gathering with dancing and drumming and lots of socializing, and no alcohol on a dry reserve like the Stoney reserve, just lots of tea) and I would trail my parents around as they greeted and chatted with scores of people one at a time, each greeting starting with “Âba wathtech” (sounded like “umba wastich” to me at the time) and a handshake.

And at the Calgary Stampede we would always go to the Indian Village and stop by the teepees of people we knew and go in for a cup of tea. And then another at the next. And another at the next. Until I was full of tea pee from the teepees.

Many people probably think that teepees are some Hollywood thing or are a racial stereotype or what have you. Actually, setting up the teepee and spending some time in it are now sort of the Stoney equivalent of what many city dwellers do when they open up the cottage in the spring and go up to it for weekends, or the same with the dacha for the well-off in Russia. Teepees are a part of the cultural heritage, somewhat improved with the availability of canvas (just as tea and bannock have become very important imports in the cuisine); they are no longer principal residences, but they are still valued. And when I was a young teen and we lived in a large piece of land at the edge of the reserve and the foot of a mountain, we had one that we set up a short distance from our house and would go out to it with guests.

We also had salt and pepper shakers shaped like teepees. Little ceramic teepees. We didn’t use them much at the table – we had others that poured better. There was also a motel in Canmore that had a teepee-shaped cottage or cabin or whatever you want to call it; it was two storeys tall. We stayed in it once, due, I think, to renovations on our house. It was cold and the shower had poor water pressure, and it wasn’t very pretty inside. It’s not there anymore.

So anyway, teepees were once the portable residences of Plains Indians such as the Nakoda, permanent residences in that they always lived in them but not permanent in location. Now they are temporary and second residences and tend to be set up in more or less the same place every year. The impermanence has shifted from location to habitation.

And where does this word, teepee, come from? And am I spelling it correctly? Indeed, there are other spellings. You may see tepee; more common recently is tipi. It happens that I grew up with teepee, but the tipi spelling appeals to me, as it exactly matches the International Phonetic Alphabet spelling of the word. We used to render the [i] sound with ee by default; now that we are much more aware of the orthographical traditions of other languages and are less confident in our own, tipi seems a better way to spell it. And that is how you spell it in the language it came from.

Which is not Nakoda. Not quite. Tipi is a Dakota word. The Nakoda word is tibi (same spelling as the Latin for ‘to you’). If you look in the Oxford English Dictionary, you will read that the word comes from “Sioux or Dakota ˈtīpī tent, house, dwelling, abode.” But that’s not quite the whole story. Where to get the accurate goods on it? From my dad, of course, fluent Nakoda speaker and trained linguist. I’ll just quote him directly:

Stoney Nakoda ti = “dwelling, house,” etc.

Duki ti = “Where does he/she live/dwell?”

Duki tibi (or in Dakota Sioux, tipi) = “Where do they live/dwell?”

Tibi ze = “the place where they live/dwell”

Tibi (Dakota, tipi) = “they dwell”

BECOMES ENGLISH BORROWING WITH QUITE SPECIFIC MEANING: “teepee/tepee” = “conical canvas tent used principally among Plains Indigenous people”

So there you have it. A bit of linguistic teepology for you.

And so a teepee is where they dwell. Not where we dwell – where they dwell. It’s an English-speaker’s word, taken from someone else’s language, for where those someone elses live. Or lived. I don’t know if there’s any verb morphology available to express that it’s now habitual but intermittent.

Teepee sounds, obviously, like TP. I don’t see connection between a teepee and toilet paper, though. I would be more inclined to think of a teepee as a DP as in “dwelling place.” But DP also stands for displaced person. That term usually means someone who has had to move from where they lived. For some people it’s more accurate to say they had to stop moving with where they lived. Now they’re placed, and their displaceable dwellings are no longer their permanent impermanent addresses.

Maybe I would do better to think of TP as standing for tea place. Because that is one thing it certainly is. But I won’t dwell on it.

7 Comments

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , ,

oblipicha

Posted on February 22, 2013 | Leave a comment

I was recently looking at the website of a pharmacy chain and noticed a product advertised, oblipicha mask.

What mask? I almost took off my glasses to look again. The arrangement of letters was unexpected.

Oblipicha.

Hmm. It’s a spiky little bush of a word. Starts with ob as in obscure and obelisk, obl as in obloquy, obli as in oblique. After an opening zero there is a blip. I see lip; I see lipi as in lipid; I see ip as in ipecac; I see pic; I see pich as in almost pitch and rearranged chip; I see ic; I see cha as in cha-cha and the Mandarin and Japanese words for ‘tea’; I see ha. The word has three ascenders and two dots plus, in the middle, a sole descender. It almost looks like an infernal machine designed to input an o and output an a.

Given the context – a nourishing hair mask (hair mask? that’s a thing now?) – and the fact that it’s an exotic and eye-twisting word, sort of like ylang-ylang, I can assume it’s some herbal thing.

So I Google it, of course.

Google asks me if I meant obliphica and gives me 460,000 results for that. When I say I wanted oblipicha I see 98,200 results for that. Hmm. So which is the misspelling? Or are they both possible transliterations? I look at a couple of results.

At the blog Take Nina’s Word for It, I enjoy reading this bit that proves yet again that I am not barking up the wrong tree with word tasting: “To me, Obliphica has a very unappealing ring to it, some weird combination of ‘obligation’ and ‘fichsa’ (literally: yuck!). Therefore it translates in my brain as ‘…this obligatory yucky stuff will do wonders for your complexion…’”

But another hit gives me the valuable information I really want: this word is transliterated from Russian oблепиха. Now, you probably don’t read Cyrillic, so I’ll tell you an important fact: Russian has a letter for the sound “ch” like in English “chip,” and it has a letter for the sound “ch” like in German “ach” and Scottish “loch.” That latter sound is normally transliterated as kh from Russian for clarity, or as h because it’s not always quite as harsh as the German or Scots versions. In this word, it is the latter letter that is used: like kh or h. Also, the vowel after the l character is an e but the Russian e usually has palatalization before it (so the word for ‘no’, which looks like it might be transliterated as net, is – as you probably know – said “nyet,” with the “ny” like a Spanish ñ). Which means that this word is better transliterated as oblepikha or oblyepikha or oblepiha or oblyepiha. Which get 10,800, 1, 59,700, and 9 results, respectively. That palatalized e can also sound a bit like a “short” i, giving oblipikha or oblipiha, with 152 and 3110 results, respectively.

Or you could just call it sea buckthorn (not to be confused with non-sea buckthorn, a different species). Or sallowthorn, seaberry, sandthorn, Sanddorn, argousier, finbar, homoktövis, dhar-bu, tindved, rokitnik, or Hippophae, depending on what your marketing department thinks is best. I actually kinda like sea buckthorn just fine. It has a spiky cowboy-sailor feel to it.

So why oble– oblye– obli– um, obliterate that with that Russian word? Let’s take Nina’s word for it: “The most recent ubiquitous ‘wonder’ oil is Obliphica oil. Note, however, that this name appears mostly on Israeli websites as well as on eBay, by people (Israelis?) trying to sell hair care products.” Why would Israelis use a Russian word? Because Israel has a sizable Russian population – when Israel started offering citizenship to anyone who was Jewish by birth, a lot of Russian Jews took them up on it and moved there. They speak Hebrew in Israel, of course, but if they need a word for something they don’t know a Hebrew word for, why not use a Russian word?

Sea buckthorn has been used in various cultures for various healing effects for ages and ages. It has a lot of vitamins C and E and assorted other antioxidants, and it produces some oils that are apparently nice to use on the face and hair and some juice that you can drink. So there it is. Where? In a hair product or face cream near you.

Actually, most of the world’s cultivated sea buckthorn – or oblipicha, or whatever oblique picture of a word you want – is in China. It’s planted there for soil and water conservation. It grows, you see, in places other plants will not: deserts, and also that bit of the shore so close to the sea spray that other plants can’t hack it. Once you’re away from the harsh environment, the other plants outcompete the sea buckthorn. So this spiky deciduous dioecious shrub with slivery silvery-green leaves and orange berries (those are the useful, nutritious part) is found in an assortment of unfriendly environments. And probably doesn’t give a damn what you call it.

Leave a comment

Posted in word tasting notes

Tagged , , , , ,